


All Men Kill The Things They Love

by Lomonaaeren



Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2020 [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Bondage, Character Death, Curses, Drama, Gore, Horror, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:15:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27309070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: After the war, the last thing Severus wants to do is help Potter. But Potter’s tale of a curse that has killed almost everyone he loves, and his plea for help to break that curse, stirs Severus’s intellectual curiosity, if nothing else. As he and Potter work side-by-side on the curse, however, Severus begins to suspect, uneasily, that Potter may want to do more than simply prevent the number of dead from increasing; he may want to bring them back.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy & Severus Snape, Harry Potter/Severus Snape
Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993852
Comments: 54
Kudos: 320





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It is, as you can see from the notes, an extremely dark story. It should have four parts, to be posted over the next four days. The title is from Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” quoted below.

“And all men kill the thing they love,  
By all let this be heard,  
Some do it with a bitter look,  
Some with a flattering word,  
The coward does it with a kiss,  
The brave man with a sword!” -Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

The knock woke Severus in the middle of the night, which, looking back later, was entirely appropriate.

That it was a knock made Severus approach the door of his small cottage all the more warily after he had put on a robe. No one _polite_ was supposed to know where he lived. If the Aurors that he knew still searched for him had found him, they would have broken down the door. Draco would have come through the Floo.

He aimed his wand at the door. There was no knock for a moment, and Severus had nearly relaxed when it came again.

“Who is _there_?” Severus hissed out before he thought better of it. Of course he ought to have kept silent and let the mistaken knocker—who _must_ have mixed up his house with someone else’s—simply leave, but his mouth had spoken before he could think.

This time, a voice said, “Professor Snape? I need your help.”

This time, Severus strode across the drawing room between the small bits of furniture there and flung open the door. The night outside was quiet, cloudy, cool. But there was enough moonlight to discern the boy standing on the doorstep, whose voice Severus had recognized, and his huddled mop of hair.

“ _Potter._ ” Severus weighed the words on his tongue before he said them, because it was so delicious to be _free_ to say them. “I don’t give a damn what you want.”

He started to close the door, and Potter lifted his head and turned to face him at the same moment as his wand lit with a _Lumos_ Charm.

Severus stopped moving. Potter’s eyes looked worse than they had the night Albus died.

“Please,” Potter said, his voice shattered. “I need your help.”

*

“You heard about the deaths in the _Daily Prophet_?”

“I never pay attention to that rag anymore now that I don’t have to,” Severus snapped. He tried to ignore the feeling of those haunted eyes on his back as he warmed up soup with a few snaps of his wand. Potter had looked thinner than he had as a child in the light of the cottage. And although he hadn’t said anything about wanting food, he hadn’t protested when Severus got the soup out, either.

 _Why is it my fate to coddle Potters?_ Severus clenched his jaw and stirred the soup with motions of his wand just under the level of sharpness that would have made it fly out of the cauldron.

“Ginny, Ron, and Hermione are dead.”

Severus spun around to stare at Potter. He was staring past Severus at the wall of the cottage, and a trick of the light made his face resemble a skull’s. Severus swallowed and returned to not letting the soup sizzle over the rim of the pot. It seemed important.

“How did they die?” he finally asked, when Potter was silent and stared like a corpse.

“Ginny woke up mad one morning,” Potter said, and Severus checked immediately over his shoulder. But Potter’s voice was flat enough, and what he said sounded like a truth to Severus. “It was as if the diary that possessed her in her first year had come back. She was speaking in Parseltongue—or supposedly, it really wasn’t anything—and tried to stab me with a poisoned blade she conjured. I escaped, but I called Ron and Hermione for help, and they came over and wouldn’t believe me when I said she was mad. Ron got stabbed when he tried to restrain her. He died instantly. Hermione got scratched, and she lived for a few hours, but the poison was too strong.”

Severus slowly shook his head. The soup was done, and he Levitated the entire ball of liquid from the cauldron and split it between two bowls. “And what did happen? I take it you do not truly believe that she was possessed by any remnant of the spirit of the Dark Lord.” He carried the bowls over to the couch beside the fire where Potter had collapsed.

Potter took his while giving him a searching glance. “You won’t say his name even now?”

Severus flinched, and did his best not to show it as he sipped slowly from his bowl. “I will not.”

Potter didn’t challenge him. He turned his vacant glance back to the fire, at least until Severus stared at him and tapped the side of the soup bowl. Then he began to slowly scoop up softened bits of chickens and vegetables with the spoon Severus had provided him with before he began preparing the meal. “I took Ginny to St. Mungo’s along with Hermione. They—said there was nothing wrong with her.”

“There used Legilimency on her, I suppose?”

Potter nodded and put down the bowl again. It was partially empty, at least. “They said it was a break in her mind. Not possession.”

Severus shrugged. The Weasley girl had been brave enough during the year when Severus had had to act as the Headmaster of Hogwarts, but he had no opinion on her otherwise. “What happened to her?”

“She—cut her throat with the dagger before anyone could stop her.”

“I am—sorry for the impact that must have had on you.” The last time Severus had bothered to pay attention to the _Prophet,_ he thought it had said that Potter and the Weasley girl were dating.

Potter nodded and stared into the bowl again. Then he began to eat, slowly.

“But I don’t see how I can help you in any way,” Severus added, when the silence had gone on long enough that he would have thought even Potter could take a hint. He didn’t know how to deal with this Potter like a wicker man walking, though.

Potter turned to him. “Two months ago, Mr. Weasley was killed by a werewolf who had come to the Ministry to register and somehow transformed without the full moon.” He ignored Severus’s flinch again. “After the news about Ginny and Ron, Mrs. Weasley killed herself. An _Avada Kedavra_ to the head.”

Severus closed his eyes. It was somehow harder to conceive of the world bereft of Molly and Arthur than it was of the annoying children who had followed Potter around, although that might only be because he had worked with the Weasley parents in the Order. “I am sorry to hear it.”

“George woke up with a disease yesterday that’s eating him from the inside out,” Potter went on in an expressionless voice. “This morning, Andromeda told me that Teddy Lupin has a heart defect that’s probably going to kill him before he’s twenty. There was no sign of it at his last Healer’s appointment before this one.”

“She took him to a Healer again that soon? Why?”

Potter gave him a look that made Severus feel he had asked the wrong question. “This is a curse,” he said, in the same expressionless voice. “How much do you know about the Deathly Hallows?”

“I know that the Dark Lord tried to kill me for the Elder Wand.”

Potter paused, and his face seemed to flicker between expressions for a second, like a skull struggling to speak. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I forgot.”

The last thing Severus wanted to contemplate was Potter worrying about him, so he dismissed that with a flick of his fingers that nearly sent the soup bowl sloshing off his lap. He held it steady and demanded, “What do the Deathly Hallows have to do with this?”

“I mastered the Elder Wand because I defeated Draco Malfoy, who was its master. And Dumbledore left me the Resurrection Stone that was in the Gaunt ring, one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes. And the Invisibility Cloak I had, the same one my father had—”

“This is impossible,” Severus interrupted. “The Master of Death is nothing more than a child’s fairy story.”

“It’s what I am.” Potter lifted the spoon from the soup and, without pausing, stuck it into his left eye.

Severus sprang to his feet with a shout, and overturned the soup bowl after all. Potter removed the spoon from his eye with a steady hand, and as Severus watched, the blood and other gore simply _faded._ There was a brief spiral of light that seemed to consume them, and then the spiral was gone and Potter was looking at him with two normal green eyes.

“What was _that_?” Severus whispered. He couldn’t even muster the strength to look away from Potter or wave his wand to clean up the mess on the floor.

“I can’t die,” Potter said, still in that voice Severus was getting heartily sick of. “Any wound anyone causes me heals. Ginny stabbed me with that same dagger, but the poison burned out the moment it entered my body.”

“And you think that your immortality is somehow connected to the deaths of those around you? I’ve never heard that was a consequence of becoming the Master of Death.”

Potter gave a dry, rasping laugh that reminded Severus of the sound of autumn leaves crackling beneath a boot. “I didn’t, either. But after Ginny died, I got out the Cloak of Invisibility, and I saw _this_.”

There was a dark flash in the air between them, no spell that Severus knew, and a figure appeared and turned towards him. Severus found himself flinching for the third time that night. He had expected something like a Dementor, but this was worse. Darkness formed into the shape of a man, with a voice that hissed into his ears.

And the voice brought not words, but sensations. Severus knew in instants what it would be like to burn to death, to suffocate on fumes from an improperly-prepared potion when the door was only meters away, to succumb to the bite of the snake Potter had saved him from, to have his soul sucked out from the Dementor’s Kiss—

“ _Stop_!”

The sensations vanished. Severus found himself on the floor, panting, on his hands and knees. He stamped down the shame that tried to rise up in him. This wasn’t about whether shame was a good response or not. He would have defied the Dark Lord himself to remain standing in the face of that.

He leaned back and stared at Potter. Potter was once again sitting there and staring straight at the wall. Severus shook his head. “What ways of dying do you feel?” His voice was hoarse, and he Summoned a glass wordlessly and then conjured water for it.

“Nothing.” Potter glanced at him. “I told you, I can’t die. I hear the voice of my mother whispering the curse.”

“The curse that you believe goes along with being the Master of Death.” At least Severus’s voice sounded like his own again. He stumbled back to his feet and leaned against the side of the couch.

“Yes. To live forever, while those I love die.”

Severus shook his head. “It could be a coincidence—”

“Then they would have found something when they looked into Ginny’s mind at St. Mungo’s.” Potter’s voice broke at last, and he held his hands over his face as if he didn’t want to see the world anymore. “They would have discovered Teddy’s heart defect _before_ now. They would know the source of George’s illness.”

“Get rid of the Hallows,” Severus suggested, and then shifted in place at the stare Potter cast him. It was too much like the stare that Severus himself would have used when he was teaching Potter.

“I tried. I tried everything I could think of. I cast Fiendfyre on them. I dropped them in the deepest part of the ocean I could find. I used basilisk venom. I threw them away from me. They appear next to me every morning. They laugh and taunt me, too.”

“With what voices?”

“Sirius’s.”

Severus wished now that he hadn’t asked. He stared in silence at Potter, who was slumped over and looked as if he had gone back to being broken. Severus found that he would have—he would have given much to never see Potter that way. It wasn’t appropriate.

“How do you think I can help you?”

Potter glanced up at him. “You can help me break the curse.”

“I am not a curse-breaker. Go to Bill Weasley.”

“Then the curse will probably take him, too. And the last thing the Weasleys need is for me to ruin the rest of them.” Potter’s lips pulled back, and Severus knew now that the resemblance to a skull he had seen in him hadn’t been a coincidence. “The curse takes people I _love_. No chance of that here, Professor Snape.”

Severus supposed that much was true. But he still said, “You think I can defeat the curse with a potion?”

“Or your knowledge of Dark magic.” Potter’s voice limped along, tired again. “I know that you probably knew lots of it. One of the better Defense teachers we had, all in all.”

Severus wanted to ask what would prevent Potter from going to the Aurors the moment the curse was broken, but the words died, strangled, in his throat. Potter might be under suspicion for the deaths of the Weasleys, for all he knew. And if he tried to rave to them about the Deathly Hallows and the voice of Death speaking the curse, he’d go to St. Mungo’s himself.

As it was, this sounded like an intellectual challenge that Severus might savor.

He nodded. “So be it.”

*

“Did you know that when you put on the Cloak, you look like a Dementor yourself?”

Potter glanced absently at him from where he was stirring a cauldron full of Ice-Cold Draught. Severus had determined that the man was, at least, unlikely to mess _that_ up. “You can see me with the Cloak on?”

“I don’t know if anyone else could,” Severus began.

“Yeah. When I used it to go to Knockturn Alley this morning, I don’t think anyone did.”

“But I saw you as a Dementor-like creature.” Severus stared at Potter’s moving hands, and then shook his head and turned back to the tome in front of him, one of the few books he’d been able to find that took the tales of the Master of Death seriously. “Do you know why that would be?”

“Not the least idea.”

Potter didn’t sound interested, either. Severus sneered to himself. Well, he supposed that he shouldn’t have expected better of intellectual theorizing from a Potter.

He turned a page of the book, and then caught his breath. His stillness was enough to make Potter turn to face him, although he at least put a Stasis Charm on the cauldron before he did so.

“What is it?”

Severus turned the book around. “Does this look like the Resurrection Stone to you?” In terms of direct, physical experience, Potters’ views could sometimes be valuable.

Potter stepped forwards and squinted down at the picture. His finger came out and traced around the side of the image, and Severus nearly snapped at him to get his hands off the precious book. But in the end, Potter simply pulled his hand back and nodded.

“It does, but the symbol of the Deathly Hallows is on the stone. Not this inscription.”

“I wonder if the inscription was rubbed off over time, or concealed. This picture is very old.”

Potter held out his hand stiffly in front of him and closed his eyes, and a stone simply materialized above his palm and fell into it. Severus stared in silence for a second. Then he leaned near enough to examine the edges of the stone. Potter held it passively, except for moving the stone when Severus indicated that he should with one finger.

 _He_ was not about to touch the thing without some sort of permission. Which would probably have to come from the stone instead of Potter himself, come to think of it.

Severus glanced back and forth from the picture to the stone, and finally nodded. “Yes. See on the edge here, where this side is slightly less round? Someone might have scrubbed off the inscription long ago.”

“What does the inscription say?”

Severus hesitated, but he could read runes, and there was really no reason why Potter shouldn’t hear this. “Cursed be he who holds this with the loss of all he loves.”

“Ahhh.”

Potter exhaled the sound in an almost satisfied manner, which Severus was going to snap at him about, but in the end, he restrained his tongue. It was probably only at the confirmation of what Potter had suspected, anyway.

Potter gazed at the stone for a second before he turned back to Severus. “Do you need it for anything else?”

“No.” Of course Severus would have liked a chance to examine it, since it was the _Resurrection Stone,_ but again, he thought he would need the stone’s permission, and the thing was unlikely to give it.

Potter nodded, and the stone vanished from his palm as if it had Apparated itself. He turned back to the cauldron, and Severus turned back to the book.

*

“May I examine the cloak?”

Potter handed the thing over without flinching and without looking up from the very large black book that he’d gone—somewhere—to get. Severus was honestly not sure what Potter did or where he went during the hours that they weren’t trying to find a way to free him from the Hallows’ curse. He presumably had some place he slept, away from the prying eyes of reporters who wanted to interview him about his friends’ and girlfriend’s deaths, but it could have been anywhere.

Severus held the cloak carefully, but it didn’t feel as viscerally threatening as the stone had simply lying in Potter’s hand. Perhaps because it had been used more often to hide over the centuries? He played the hems and edges through his hands, and finally found what he was looking for, stitched in small silver runes near the hood.

“This one,” Severus breathed, “says that, ‘He shall live until he wishes to die.’ How does that fit in with immortality?”

“I suspect it’s the combination of the Hallows more than anything,” Potter said, and flipped a page in his book without looking up. “Probably with just the Cloak, someone _can_ live like Ignotus Peverell in the story and go to greet Death when they’re ready. But combined with the others, it means that they’ll be joined in a triangle of power and I can’t die until I’ve lost everyone I love.”

Severus stared at him. Potter continued reading the book, and scribbling down notes on a piece of parchment next to him. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

“I don’t know that it’s right,” Potter said, shooting him a mild glance. “It might be complete nonsense, for all I know. But it make sense.”

Severus really wanted to ask where Potter had gained the intellectual capacity to come up with a theory like that, but bit his lip and kept silent. He would need to examine the wand next. But he didn’t need to do it today.

*

“This is the Elder Wand.”

Severus couldn’t help his hand shaking a little as he took the wand from Potter. He shot a narrow glance at Potter, but Potter had already turned back to the black tome that seemed to be consuming all his time when he wasn’t doing research or stirring potions that Severus had directed him in. Severus supposed it was nothing more than fixation on a possible solution.

It took forever for Severus to find the runes on the wand, for all that it was smaller than the cloak. When he took it over near the fire, he finally saw them, entwined with the carvings on the wand’s shaft.

“He who wields me shall live until he is conquered,” Severus whispered, and then frowned. Did that mean that Potter needed to lose a duel and be disarmed, the way Albus had?

He was back on the Astronomy Tower for a moment, the stones cold under his feet, Albus’s eyes fixed on him, the whisper of his name lingering around his ears like a wind colder than the stones.

“So you only need to find someone to duel you and master the wand.” Severus shook away the memory, and dropped the wand on the table. It seemed to leave a stain on his hand, as if he had picked up a dripping clump of seaweed. He wiped his hand on his robes. It didn’t help.

“No, not if it interacts with the other artifacts.” Potter gave him one of those calm glances that seemed so common with him, as if he had detached himself as much as possible. With the deaths around him, Severus thought, perhaps he’d had to or he would have gone mad. “I did try dueling with Ron, before I understood the curse. I just wanted to get rid of the damn thing and stop the whispering.”

“And Weasley was stupid enough to want it?”

“He was my friend. He would have done anything for me.”

Severus glanced away, and cleared his throat. “But you would have passed on the curse by passing it on.”

“Not unless he mastered the other two artifacts.” Potter shook his head. “But apparently, it’s different when someone duels the actual _Master of Death_ for the Elder Wand as opposed to someone fighting an ordinary wizard who holds it. Ron Disarmed me, but the Elder Wand hung in the air between us and refused to move. Then I tried to give Ron the Cloak, but that didn’t work, either. It held onto my back and wouldn’t let go.”

“Perhaps the Cloak needs to be inherited, the way you inherited it from your father.” Severus was proud of himself for not spitting the last two words.

“Perhaps,” Potter said. “Which would be a good trick when I can’t die.”

“You need not snap at me, Potter, when I am only trying to help.” Severus sneered and turned to fetch his own book on curses from the store that Potter had brought from somewhere—probably the old library in Grimmauld Place, not that Severus had ever had a chance to examine the books there.

“I wasn’t snapping. I was stating a fact.”

A faint tone of surprise touched Potter’s voice, and Severus spun around, intent on catching the emotion and forcing Potter to express some more. But Potter was once again bent over the black book, his brow furrowed and distorting his scar as he wrote down some quick notes.

Severus narrowed his eyes. There was no title on the book, or in fact any words on the spine or cover at all, and Potter never let it out of arm’s reach. He’d only given Severus a blank look when he asked to look at it. But Severus was increasingly convinced that it was part of the puzzle, and that he needed to see it.

 _Perhaps there is a fourth Deathly Hallow, only revealed to the Master of Death._ Children’s tales were hardly a reliable guide to history, after all.

*

The sound of the Floo opening made Severus come out of his lab, after putting a Stasis Charm on the potion he was brewing. Luckily, it was only a simple one that would reveal enchantments around an object, which Severus intended to use to see if any of the Hallows were directly connected to the curse.

Draco stepped out of the fireplace. He looked slightly disheveled, which concerned Severus more than the hectic tone to his voice. “Do you have a moment, sir?”

Severus nodded and gestured to his couch. This wasn’t one of the days that Potter would visit. He was off conducting “research” somewhere, or perhaps asleep in his mysterious living place. “Are you all right, Draco? Did Scorpius cause some kind of trouble?” Scorpius’s magic was developing young, and he had so far broken two windows and destroyed a fireplace.

“No. I just—” Draco swallowed and turned to him, not sitting down the way he usually did. “I need to know that you didn’t have anything to do with it, Severus.”

Severus blinked at him, for once at a loss. “What are you talking about, Draco? Anything to do with what?”

“No, you didn’t.” Draco sank onto the couch as though someone had turned his knees to water. “Oh, good. I was absolutely sure you hadn’t, but I needed to see your face.”

“If you do not tell me what you are talking about, Draco, you shall shortly begin to irritate me.”

Draco coughed and sat up. “Sorry, sir. There’s been a lot of—well, grave-robbing going on in the past few weeks. I knew that you wouldn’t have anything to do with it without a very good reason,” he added hastily, probably seeing the lightning gathering in Severus’s eyes. “But I wanted to ask. I know that your name is one being tossed around at the Ministry.”

“No one is supposed to know I’m alive, Draco!”

Potter had known. But then, he had saved Severus’s life in the first place. And perhaps, with his strange powers as the Master of Death, he would have been able to know if Severus was alive or not anyway.

_What would it be like? How does he see the world?_

Draco shook his head, drawing Severus from his reverie. “It’s not like that. It’s just the kind of conspiracy theorizing that happens every time you get some Dark wizarding activity or an unpleasant crime. Just the way some people act like the Dark Lord is going to come back because—well, because.”

Severus consciously did not allow his hand to move to his left arm the way Draco’s had, to clutch at the Mark. That part of his life was over now. “Whose graves have been broken into? And what was taken?” Most of the time, ancient artifacts or grave dust would be stolen, but it was always possible for it to be something else.

Draco grimaced. “Dumbledore’s tomb, at Hogwarts. And the graves of all the Weasleys who died recently, and Granger.”

Severus disguised his urge to freeze by turning away and studying the fire. “And what was taken? You can tell me, Draco.”

“Bones, teeth, hair. And dust.” Draco glanced towards him again. Severus could feel that although he didn’t turn away from the flames. “I’m sorry for suspecting you, but you can understand why I did.”

“Yes,” Severus murmured. The ingredients were the sorts that not that many necromancers would use, because grave dust and artifacts were so much more effective most of the time. They were, however, the sort that would be valuable for potions.

For _certain_ potions.

Like the kinds that would be used in a resurrection ritual.

Severus honestly didn’t know how he got through the rest of the conversation with Draco. He made polite noises and inquired after Scorpius and Astoria, he remembered that much, and sent Draco away convinced of his innocence. Draco would spread the right rumors through the Ministry, he knew. He would spare Severus’s peaceful life.

And then he sat down and closed his eyes.

He had _thought_ Potter seemed too detached for the pile of deaths that had fallen on him all at once. What if that wasn’t a front or because he was trying to protect himself from succumbing to emotion, but because he was confident he could bring them back? If they were resurrected, Potter had probably convinced himself, they could not be touched by Death’s curse again.

Severus would have to do something about it. He could not permit resurrections to happen like that, particularly if Potter intended to fashion the resurrections after the only ritual he would know—the one the Dark Lord had used to rise. That was beyond foul, and what he would create would be neither the monstrous creature the Dark Lord had been nor shambling Inferi.

They would be creatures that were, if Severus’s readings in the Dark Arts were correct—and he was confident his were more advanced than Potter’s—far faster and stronger than any Auror, as resistant to magic as a giant, and not capable of being controlled. Creatures who hated the living, who wanted to destroy them.

_I have to stop him._


	2. Chapter 2

“I wish to see the book that you are always studying.”

Potter leaned back for a moment and blinked at him. The blank look that was more and more often in his eyes vanished. “I don’t have it with me today.” He nodded at the cauldron next to him. “I thought we were brewing today.”

 _Convenient,_ the thought whipped through Severus’s mind, before he dismissed it. He had to be careful. If Potter suspected that Severus knew what he was up to, then he could presumably use the Deathly Hallows to make Severus’s life highly unpleasant. “We are, of course,” he said, “but I only wished to know what you had discovered from the book. It might complement or change what we’re doing with the potions.”

“I brought my notes with me. They’re on the table over there.” And Potter turned back to the cauldron, the mask of humanity falling from his face. For an instant, watching him, Severus thought he saw the stretch of mighty wings about him, rising and collapsing, reaching out to touch the walls with the span of a dragon’s.

 _Does Death have such wings?_ And now there were tatters of useless thoughts chasing each other through Severus’s head, fragments of Muggle myths half-remembered from childhood about angels of death and archangels and fallen angels.

 _You don’t even know that the wings were feathered,_ Severus thought before he banished the useless thoughts altogether and reminded himself what he was here for.

Of course, Potter had probably not written down the most revealing of his research, but Severus might glean insights from what he had. It had only been a few years since the war. In that time, if Potter had learned to hide all his thoughts from someone intent on discovering them, Severus would eat the Hallows.

He flipped through the first page of notes, which seemed to be related only to musings about Death by the book’s author, and then stopped on the second page, staring.

“Something wrong?”

Severus hid his flinch at the thought that his pause was visible enough to attract Potter’s forever detached attention. He would never be able to stop the boy from acting like a mad necromancer if he was going to be this _obvious_ about it. “I only wondered about this circle you had drawn on the second page,” he croaked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

From habit, his words were the strict truth, necessary when he had spent so long speaking to two powerful wizards capable of Legilimency. But only _strict_ truth. The ornamental devices Potter had drawn around the circle were unfamiliar to him, but he knew it for what it was.

The circle of a necromancer.

“I don’t understand all of them myself,” Potter said, with a calm shrug when Severus glanced back at him. “But I think the skulls and some of the rest are only related to the fact that the book talks about Death.”

Severus managed not to crumple the side of the page in his fingers, but it was a near thing. He studied the circle again. The images of flowers that might have been roses were—odd. Generally, necromancers kept far away from the use of living things in their rituals.

_Should I signal to him that I know what he is doing? He might stop if he realizes that someone is watching him._

But in the end, Severus had to reject that thought. Potter had been stubborn and contrary all through his Hogwarts career, and he would likely be the same way now. Becoming the Master of Death could not have changed him _that_ much.

No, better to remain silent, learn all he could under the guise of wanting to understand more about Potter’s research, and then bring Potter down with the equivalent of a Stunner to the back when it was needed.

He studied the circle for long enough that he was sure he could recall a good memory in the Pensieve later, however, and then turned the page. On the next one was a drawing that made all the hairs on the back of his neck rise and his breathing came hoarse and quick.

“Snape? Are you all right?”

“Fine. But I think you drew this circle wrong.” Severus was amazed that he could sound so normal, especially when Potter came over to him and stood staring down at the page with a calm, uninterested look on his face.

“Oh, no,” Potter said. “I copied that one directly from the book. The only thing I had to fill in was the name.” He brushed his fingers across the name in the center of the circle, which said _Ron Weasley_. “I actually used a charm that copied the page itself.”

“I have never heard of such a charm.” His breathing was back under control now.

“Hermione taught it to me before she died. I don’t know if she found it or if she invented it.”

And _Potter’s_ voice was calm, almost glacial, which was so odd that Severus glared at him. Potter only blinked back before he turned to go after another book that they had both been studying, one on the history of quests for the Deathly Hallows. It was the closest of anything they had to a history book on the Hallows themselves.

Severus stared down at the circle again. Potter didn’t sound as if he mourned his friends. His calm hadn’t broken except on that one occasion during his first visit to Severus. He had drawn a circle that might look like harmless ink on paper, but would be laid out on the ground with grave dirt and powdered bone.

And his former best friend’s name was in the center of the circle.

Yes, Potter didn’t miss his friends because he intended to _return them to life._ And Severus knew well enough that circles like this required a human sacrifice. It was possible Potter would seek out and kill an innocent, but…

_Better for him to keep it close to the chest. Better for him if few people know what he’s doing._

Potter intended to kill _him_ as the sacrifice. Severus was sure of it.

*

“And you won’t reveal your face?”

The Unspeakable’s voice was rough and impatient. Severus leaned forwards, making sure that his body was entirely swathed in the thick dark cloak that he’d splashed with a potion of his own devising before he contacted the Ministry. It wasn’t an Invisibility Cloak, nor did it have the quality of the charms that the Unspeakables used to conceal their own faces. But as long as he was under it, he baffled the eyes and made them water, and no one would be able to recall his true voice, only the facts he had shared.

As long as he stayed under the cloak, and let nothing peek out from under it.

“No,” he said. “What should matter to you is the information I’m bringing to you, not who I am.”

The two cloaked grey people in front of him exchanged what were probably speaking glances, although Severus didn’t know how they could be sure, given that they couldn’t _see_ each other’s faces. But then one sighed, or at least gave a sound that Severus heard as a sigh, and nodded, and the one on the right faced him again. “Very well,” he, or perhaps she, said, in a long-suffering tone. “What information do you have to impart?”

“It concerns the rash of grave-robbing incidents that the Ministry has investigated lately.”

That made one of the Unspeakables take out a copper rod and point it at him. Severus managed to hold still, despite the uncomfortable twinge under his ribs as he realized that he didn’t have a clue what the rod was, or what it would do to him. He sat huddled under the cloak, and after a moment, the rod swung to point at the floor instead.

“Are you the necromancer in question?”

“No. But I was helping the necromancer in question, and I didn’t know that he meant to use that material—”

“How could you not? Why would you help in a necromantic ritual in the first place?”

“He hasn’t actually performed the ritual,” Severus said, managing, with effort, to hold himself to a calm tone. _So impatient. Most people are dunderheads long past the point where they’ve stopped being Hogwarts students._ “I thought what he was doing was essentially harmless research. And then I heard from another source about the grave-robberies, and realized that what he was doing was _not_.”

Something, maybe the gravitas in his voice on the last words, convinced them. The one with the copper rod put it away, and the other one said, “And what is his name?”

Severus opened his mouth.

And it was as if a sword made of white lightning had struck him in the side of the head.

He gasped and reached up with one hand, barely remembering to keep it under the cover of the cloak. All around him, the silver-walled room shifted and rang like a great bell. The Unspeakables started, and Severus could see their lips moving, but he couldn’t hear a thing past the strange static in his head.

At last, it ended. Severus remained with his head bent over his knees for a moment, and not only because he wanted to make sure that his face remained under the cloak.

He had never experienced something like that. It wasn’t that it was painful. He had undergone the Cruciatus Curse with less than this extreme sense of _disorientation._

And he suspected he knew what it was. The Deathly Hallows protected their own.

Severus couldn’t figure out why they would do it when Potter was trying to get _rid_ of their curse, but he nonetheless knew it was true.

“Are you all right?”

The nearest Unspeakable was at least speaking in a voice he could hear again. Severus made himself bob his head, and then clear his throat. “My apologies. It appears that he has cast a curse to make it impossible for me to speak his name. I—didn’t know that he’d done such a thing.”

He should have been able to _sense_ it. After all, Potter hadn’t been shy about demonstrating the abilities that came with the curse of the Hallows. And Severus had seen the signs like the wings of the angel of death stretching from Potter’s shoulder blades. Keeping something like this silent was counterproductive.

“Hm.” The nearest Unspeakable turned to face the other, who had his, or her, copper rod in hand again. “Then it’s a curse that neither of us has ever seen, either. The world around you flashed white, and we heard a roar like a crack of thunder. And then you sat there, shaking, and couldn’t hear anything we said to you.”

“It was like being struck by lightning on my end,” Severus offered. The Unspeakables researched obscure magic for a living, after all. If they could figure out how to nullify the curse, then Severus could tell them Potter’s name.

“Unusual,” said one of them, at the same moment as the other said, “Intriguing.”

Severus scowled. “How am I supposed to convey the necromancer’s name to you in the face of this curse?”

“I don’t know that you can,” said one of the Unspeakables, with a hand in the air as though touching the strings of an invisible curse that extended away around Severus. “You may be entirely unable to influence it. Fascinating.”

“ _Fascinating_?”

“Well, yes. It is. So is the spellwork on your cloak. May we examine it?”

Severus stood up and stalked out of the room. When he reached the plain black corridor that he’d been led down earlier, he was puzzled for a second, but then he found the right turn and walked down it with his nose in the air.

_Bloody Unspeakables. I should have known they would be no help._

The Deathly Hallows were objects of legend, and Potter was something of a legend himself. Severus would seek out the help of the only other legend he knew.

*

“Really, Severus? You’re worried about young Harry?”

Severus ground his teeth. He had been speaking with Albus’s portrait for five minutes, and still the man insisted on returning to the means that he and Potter had used to put aside their animosity, rather than talking about the Elder Wand, which was the whole reason Severus had come here.

“Can you stay on topic, Albus? Minerva might come back any minute!”

“I never understood why you didn’t want to let her know that you’re alive, Severus. You know she would be overjoyed.”

Severus clenched his hand into a fist and snarled, “Potter is suffering under a curse that makes it impossible for him to have close friends or loved ones, as the Hallows kill them. Are you going to tell me what you know about the Elder Wand? Or should I leave and attempt to stop him myself?”

No white lightning struck this time, and Severus relaxed. As he had suspected might be true, talking to a portrait and not a living being made the difference.

Albus blinked and pushed his glasses up his nose. It was obscurely comforting that even his portrait self had that gesture, Severus thought, and also that _something_ could make his bloody eyes stop twinkling. “I don’t understand, Severus. If he suffers under that curse and came to you for help in breaking it, why do you want to stop him?”

Severus lowered his voice, despite the fact that he would hear Minerva’s footsteps on the stairs long before he’d hear her. She always strode up the moving staircase instead of standing in one place. “Because there have been numerous thefts of bone and the like from the graves of Potter’s friends. I believe that he plans to resurrect them.”

Albus actually appeared to catch his breath, something Severus had never seen a portrait do before. Then again, he hadn’t spent a lot of time staring at magical portraits. “That—cannot be right,” Albus whispered. “Why would he do something like _that_?”

“How should I know?” Severus twitched his shoulder in irritation. He was beginning to regret coming here. It seemed that Albus knew nothing that could help him. “If you will not tell me anything about the Elder Wand—”

“I will tell you. I did not because—well, because I came to realize that seeking the Deathly Hallows was something only a foolish man would do. But I don’t think that you have any desire to master them.”

“Why would I want to?” Severus curled his lip. “I want neither the power nor the kind of immortality that Potter is contending with.”

Albus eyed him, as if noting that he hadn’t disclaimed _all_ kinds of immortality, and then nodded. “Well. The Elder Wand killed its first owner, and supposedly it can only be claimed by conquest.”

Severus had been about to say that he knew that much from the damn Tale of the Three Brothers, but he paused. “What do you mean, _supposedly_?”

“I mean that I didn’t win the duel with Gellert,” said Albus softly. “He surrendered at the last moment. We managed to make it look as if I had beaten him. He knew as well as I did that he would be killed by his own followers if they thought of him as weak. But in reality, he gave in, and I took the Wand.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything. If the master of the Wand surrenders—”

“It still was not conquest. The Wand _chose_ to come to me, Severus. The way it _chose_ to turn on Voldemort and save young Harry.”

Cold surged through Severus. They had come far, far closer than he had ever known to a Dark Lord who _did_ have the power of the Elder Wand on his side. If the damn thing had made one of its “decisions,” that would have been the end of that.

But he managed to hold Albus’s eyes, and ask, “And so? What do you suggest we do with the Wand to make it loosen its hold on Potter?”

Albus gave him a sad smile and said, “Persuade it.”

And then Severus heard Minerva’s footsteps on the stairs, and he did have to shroud himself with a Disillusionment Charm and leave, while Albus asked loud question about why he couldn’t have lemon drops as a portrait to distract her. At least the old man was good for that much, Severus thought, as he slipped behind Minerva, through the still-open door, and down the moving staircase.

He did get successfully away. But that did nothing to calm the chaos in his mind.

_How do you persuade a wand?_

*

“Can I see the Elder Wand again?”

Potter waved an absent hand at him. _He_ was bent over the black tome that Severus still hadn’t got a good look at him, frowning as he sketched out another circle. He sat back and regarded it, then shook his head and redrew part of it. Severus yanked his stare away as he moved towards the table where the wand was lying. Just because Potter looked different than he had during his school days was no reason to act like a mouse fascinated by a snake.

The wand tingled for a moment under Severus’s touch as he picked it up, but it did nothing to lash out at him. He wondered if it cared for the purpose that Potter was pursuing, or whether the Deathly Hallows would just as soon, and just as gladly, turn on the supposed Master of Death as anyone else. The curse they had inflicted on Potter seemed to argue the latter.

Which could be good news for Severus, in that they wouldn’t try to _report_ him or the like for what he was about to do.

He stared down at the wand and formed the thought in his mind as clearly as he could.

_Would you leave him, so that he would not succeed in these rituals to bring back the dead?_

Then Severus waited, not sure what he was expecting, not sure that he would understand even if the wand deigned to speak to him. The wand would say—what? That it despised Potter and wanted to destroy him? That it had chosen its victim and would pursue him to the ends of the earth?

_Far more likely is that it will say nothing at all._

But then, he did receive an answer, stirring and questing in the far corners of his mind like a Legilimens unsure of his welcome. Severus held his breath.

He heard it clearly when he heard it, though. The Elder Wand was laughing at him.

Severus laid the wand back on the table with a shaking hand. Well, so much for Albus’s idea. Perhaps Potter could speak to the thing and persuade it, but then, he had probably already tried that route when he first learned about the curse.

“Having difficulties?”

Severus swung around. Potter loomed behind him.

And _loomed_ was the right word, Severus realized, biting his lip to keep himself from whimpering. The black wings that he had seen once before were projecting beyond Potter’s shoulders now, brushing the wall with shadowy feathers. Potter took a long step forwards, and the Elder Wand vibrated and leaped into his hand.

Potter swept it around in front of him, which did nothing that Severus could see. Then Potter nodded and tucked the wand away. “How curious,” he said, his voice deep with echoes that shouldn’t have been there as he faced Severus.

Even though the odd shadows had faded away, Severus didn’t trust the way Potter’s eyes were piercing him now. But he found his voice. He would not back down in front of the _brat_ who had been his student, even if that brat was now the Master of Death. “What’s curious?”

Potter drew nearer still, his head cocked like a curious bird’s. “That you touched the wand, but didn’t tamper with it. You only asked it a question.”

“I wouldn’t have the first idea _how_ to tamper with it,” Severus began, and then Potter was right in front of him, bending down. The shadows bent and flexed. They no longer looked like the wings of a death angel. They looked like faces, maws with open mouths, glittering teeth, glistening eyes.

No, wait, Potter was peering up at him. Of course he was. Severus blinked, unsettled. Potter wasn’t taller than he was. When had he started _dreaming_ that Potter was?

“Snape?”

And Potter was speaking in a voice that didn’t have those strange echoes in it. Of course he was, Severus thought. When he let his eyes briefly travel away from Potter, he saw the Elder Wand back on the counter, where Potter had left it.

Severus shut his eyes and took a long breath.

“Are you all right, sir?”

 _What if this is some manifestation of the curse? Or something done by the Elder Wand?_ Severus didn’t bother asking whether Potter’s experience of the last few moments was the same as his. He didn’t think either possible answer would do him any good. He simply drew himself up and frowned down at Potter. “Why do you ask?”

“You looked pasty and funny for a minute.” Potter regarded him. “Is the work getting to you, sir? I can seek out someone else to help me try to remove the curse, if you want.”

“What do you mean, _getting to me_?” Severus took a step forwards, and the world around him bent and swayed. Potter backed up a step, his eyes wide.

“I just—I thought, that since you’d retired from Hogwarts, this kind of work isn’t what you’re used to…” Severus waited, and Potter blundered straight into the trap, muttering the words. “Not as young as you used to be—”

Severus barked a sharp laugh. “I’m only a little more than forty, Potter. I can handle this _curse,_ I promise you.”

Potter snapped his head back for a moment, his eyes wide. Then he nodded and said quietly, “Of course, sir,” and went back to reading in the large black book and making notes.

Severus didn’t think he was going to ask to see it. Not today. He did cast one more suspicious glance at the Elder Wand, which sat innocently on the counter and didn’t vibrate or move or roll or any of the other suspicious things that a wand could have done.

_Suspicious things. A wand._

Perhaps he needed to spend less time working on this, not more.

*

“Severus? Severus!”

It wasn’t the first time that Draco had yelled at him through the Floo this early in the morning, but at least the other time, Astoria had been pregnant and Draco had been constantly yelling for Severus to come and dance attendance because he didn’t trust the Healers at St. Mungo’s to treat her fairly as the wife of a Malfoy. Swearing to himself as he struggled out of bed, Severus thought, _He doesn’t have that excuse this time._

At least, he _thought_ Draco didn’t have that excuse. Hoping for news of more grave robberies before he hoped for news of a second Malfoy child on the way, Severus finally stumbled out of his bedroom and into the main room. “What is it, Draco?” he snapped.

Then he paused. Even with the green color of the flames getting in the way, he couldn’t have missed how pale Draco had gone.

“What has happened?” Severus found himself speaking more gently than he’d planned, as well as sinking into a chair before the fireplace instead of standing to lecture Draco.

“I—I don’t know if I ever told you that I’d approached my aunt with the intent to reconcile.” Draco stared into the distance, while Severus fought himself back into enough wakefulness to realize that he meant Andromeda Tonks, not the dead and unmourned Bellatrix. “It wasn’t much, because she still didn’t trust Mother, but I was visiting them every month or so. I was fond of little Teddy. So was Scorpius.”

“What has happened?” Severus whispered, although from the word “was” he suspected he already knew.

“Teddy died of a heart condition in St. Mungo’s last night,” Draco said, in a dazed mumble. “Andromeda was with him. She Flooed Mother and told her, but Mother thought I needed to _sleep_. Scorpius was tiresome yesterday.” Draco closed his eyes. Severus waited, numb, already with a heartbeat like a doombeat in his ears, and then Draco whispered, “Andromeda went home and killed herself. And then someone lit the house on fire.”

“She didn’t do it?” That was the only thing Severus could think to ask.

“No. Someone—she killed herself somewhere else, but someone carried her body to St. Mungo’s and left it on the doorstep. And then the Tonks house _exploded._ Burned with something hotter than Fiendfyre, to hear the Healers tell it.”

“There’s nothing hotter than Fiendfyre.”

“There was there.”

Severus sat still. He was sure that he knew who had burned the house, and the _reason_ that Mrs. Tonks and her grandson had died. But he forced himself to say, “I am sorry for your grief, Draco.”

“Thank you. I—if you see Potter, could you tell him? Apparently, they can’t find him, and no one wants to be the first to tell him in case he—well, in case he takes it badly. No one thinks he’s really stable after what happened to Granger and the Weasleys.”

Severus nodded, his eyes still shut. “I will tell him.”

Only after the Floo had closed behind Draco did Severus think how strange it was that Draco had thought he would be in regular contact with Potter.

*

He didn’t bother going back to bed. He was sure that he knew who had burned the Tonks house, which meant that Potter knew. And that means that he would probably seek out the only other person who knew the truth behind the curse of the Deathly Hallows.

Severus’s door opened with a long, low moaning sound it had never made before. Then again, nothing on this night would surprise Severus. He stood up and waited in silence for the figure to step through.

“He’s _dead_ ,” Potter’s voice said, and his voice was pure pain.

“Your godson,” Severus said. His own voice made a croaking, moaning sound not much better than the door. He cleared his throat. “I heard. I am sorry for your loss, Potter. Would you like to—”

“You know what I want to do?” Potter said, in a voice too loud and large for his throat. “I want to _forget._ ”

And he crossed the distance between them, gliding like a Dementor, and set his lips on Severus’s.


	3. Chapter 3

Severus had never thought he would be tempted by such a thing.

Why should he think it? There had been Lily, mourned and lost. There had been the occasional fugitive assignation, held with another Slytherin student or with someone paid to be with him. And there had been no one else.

Not a Master of Death, a necromancer with green eyes and a blank gaze and sometimes the shadow of Death’s wings.

But as Potter’s fingers dug into his shoulders and his mouth sought Severus’s, Severus discovered a sluggish, growing desire. It swirled up in him like brackish water as Potter’s hands set further and harder, and then Severus groaned and let his head fall back against the wall while his hands trembled with something that might be fear.

“I’m sick of death,” Potter said, and mouthed the side of Severus’s neck. “Let me show you life.”

Those words were sickly enough that Severus should have stopped him, but it had been more than a decade. He didn’t have the strength to do that in his arms. He let Potter push him further and further back, and then they were on the bed, and Potter was kneeling in front of him to remove his socks and begin unbuttoning his robes.

Severus watched him with hazy eyes. Potter seemed to have taken on yet another overtone, not darkness this time but shining light. When he glanced up at Severus, his face looked almost relaxed, and his hands were steady as stones. He kissed the inside of Severus’s thigh, and Severus started.

“I wondered what you were like,” Potter whispered. “Beyond the façade of black robes, as still as death.”

Severus doubted that very much, but if it made Potter feel better about sleeping with him to think that he’d had a crush on Severus as a student, then so be it. Severus parted his legs, and Potter finished unbuttoning the robes and rolled Severus to the side, flinging them out from beneath him.

Severus wondered for a moment how he had the strength to do that, when he remained scrawny and Severus was so much taller than he was, but he didn’t care that much. He tugged on Potter’s shirt as the man bent over him. “You,” he said. “Out of this.”

Potter smiled slowly and tugged the shirt over his head. He was naked, then. Severus blinked. He hadn’t seen the moment that Potter had shed his boots and robes. Surely he had worn boots through the door? He hadn’t walked barefoot?

But the question became unimportant as Potter spread Severus’s legs and gazed down on his cock. It was erect and quivering, and Severus decided that he wasn’t going to worry about what it “meant” that he was responding in this way.

“Life out of death,” Potter whispered.

Severus glared at him. “Are you going to spend all your time speaking about death, or are you going to—”

But Potter lowered his head in a plunging motion, and Severus’s head thumped against the headboard. He had never _felt_ something like this, heat so sharp it was nearly pain, spreading flickering tendrils like fire all through his body. He shivered once, which made no sense, and then Potter’s mouth gentled and his tongue felt more like a human’s.

“Will you come for me?” Potter murmured, and it made no sense that Severus could hear the words perfectly, but that was perhaps another part of the Master of Death’s privileges. “Make the air tremble with the power of life overcoming death?” He eased back and used his hand on Severus’s shaft.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Potter, I need more—”

He meant to end the sentence with _Stop talking about death,_ but he didn’t manage, not when the orgasm tore out of him like something clawed ripping free from its burrow. Severus sagged back, gasping, half-panicked. He had _never_ come like that from a little sucking and stroking.

Then again, he hadn’t been with someone else in ten years, either, he reminded himself.

Potter stood up and climbed onto the bed with him. He must have cast a Cleaning Charm already, because his hand felt as dry as bones when Severus clasped him and rolled him onto his back.

_And now he has me doing it._

Severus shook the thoughts out of his mind and bent down to suck on Potter’s collarbone, something suddenly intriguing; he didn’t think he’d ever seen it out of robes. Potter gasped and reached up to place his hands, hovering, over the back of Severus’s neck, as if he wasn’t sure that pressing down harder would be welcome. Severus gave another ruthless suck, so that he would know it was _indeed_ welcome, and Potter’s hands descended.

They were shivering-hot, with the same kind of almost unpleasant heat that his mouth had held, but Severus still rolled his neck back into them, and leaned sideways to kiss Potter’s mouth. His lips felt normal, at least, and Severus savored the slight wetness. He was already getting interested again, which had something to do with Potter’s magic or his long years of drought or something else.

Potter whimpered heavily, his neck straining back. But he met Severus’s eyes and managed to smile. “I’m not Master of Death right now,” he said.

“No,” Severus said. “I would not like you to be master of anything right now.”

Potter’s eyes widened to the point that he seemed to have pits replacing them. But he smiled. “I’d like that very much.”

Severus rolled to the side, reached for his wand, and cast carefully. The bonds that surged into place around Potter’s hands from thin air were made of silver rope, trimmed with fur: the sort of bonds that Severus had learned to conjure because of who his first partner in playing these games had been.

He fastened them to the headboard, watching all the time for some sign of Potter’s displeasure with the situation. But aside from a few tugs, which seemed to be gauging the strength and stretchiness of the bonds, Potter didn’t do anything. In fact, he spread his legs and smiled welcomingly at Severus.

“On top?” he asked. “Inside?”

That had been Severus’s intention, but it still stole his breath to hear it voiced that openly. He nodded and turned to cast the spell that would pull a small put of lubrication, capped long ago because he occasionally liked to use it on himself, towards the bed.

Potter kept quiet as Severus rubbed the lubricant along his own cock, although Severus had hoped to hear some of those deep breaths quicken. When he climbed onto the bed and stretched out alongside Potter, Potter’s eyes did flick down to his cock and widen, which was gratifying.

“Do you want to back out?” Severus asked, although he was trembling with eagerness to take Potter.

Potter shook his head. “No.” He closed his eyes. “I need to forget that I’m the Master of Death.”

“Here, you are not,” Severus said. It felt as if the words were dragged from him, but, well, what he said was true. Right now, Potter looked like a tired but very mortal man, and Severus was the one who could remind him of that. “Here, I am the master as much as I am anything.” He knelt above Potter and reached between his legs.

Potter’s eyes opened with a gasp when Severus’s fingers entered him. Severus took his own pleasure in moving slowly, watching Potter’s eyes all the while, and Potter only stared back with silent, boundless determination.

“Have you ever done this before?” Severus murmured, this time for the pleasure of knowing.

Potter licked his lips. “No.”

“With a man.” Severus let his fingers drift deeper and _probe_ , and Potter’s head slammed against the headboard as he gasped. He gave no sign that he’d noticed the pain.

“No. Not with a man. Not with anyone since Ginny.”

Severus sighed with rattling dissatisfaction at that last piece of information, but he could hardly demand that Potter travel back in time and change the past. He concentrated on twisting his fingers until Potter was balanced on the edge and staring wildly into the air past his head, and then he pulled them out.

Potter made a protesting noise, or probably would have. He choked it back at the last moment, and Severus smiled smugly at him and moved until his cock was positioned near Potter’s arse.

Potter stared at him, eyes still blank. Severus tilted his head. “Second thoughts?”

“ _No_.”

The sheer decision in those words propelled Severus inwards, not stopping even when he saw Potter’s mouth twist in a rictus. Only when he was fully seated inside did Severus close his eyes and rock a little, testing the waters, as it were. Potter’s gasp rose and fluttered and settled back in his chest like the last sigh of a corpse.

But for all that he lay nearly as still as that on the bed, too, he was warm enough, and Severus fucked him with an eye on his reactions. Yes, _there_ was where his cock began to stir and lift, and when Severus hit his prostate more directly, Potter grabbed his shoulders and clung and scraped.

Severus leaned towards him, stilling the motions of his hips until they were barely present. Potter had closed his eyes and was whispering something to himself, something Severus couldn’t make out because he was too far away.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’re saying my name,” Severus murmured, when Potter opened his eyes and focused on Severus again.

“Some of it was.”

The odd, somber pulse behind his words made Severus shake his head and begin to thrust again. Potter widened his eyes but didn’t make any sound, his lips still moving without even breath behind them. Severus began to snap his hips in short, sharp motions, determined to evoke _some_ reaction from the man.

It seemed he got one, at last. Potter shuddered and came, a small sticky pool of liquid that Severus watched for a moment. When it failed to turn black or otherwise indicate that the man who had produced it was the Master of Death, Severus finally closed his eyes and surrendered to his own pleasure.

It was the _emptiest_ orgasm he’d ever had. But it was there, and he came, and he had the satisfaction of knowing he was spilling, bare, into Potter’s bare arse.

When he pulled out, Potter might not have noticed. He was still lying where Severus had placed him, still staring at the ceiling and mouthing meaningless words.

Severus considered that for a moment, then shook his head. Well, as long as this kept the man from going out and robbing more graves to try and bring back his godson, then he would take it. He loosened the ropes around Potter’s wrists and lay down in the bed, turned away from him.

If Potter ever left or even stopped endlessly whispering to himself, Severus never knew.

*

“What do you think you’re doing, Potter?”

Potter raised dark green eyes to him from where he was sitting in the center of Severus’s drawing room floor, still naked. Severus wondered how he could bear it, since he had not chosen this house for its warmth. But perhaps the fire was close enough that it didn’t matter, or the Master of Death had abilities that Potter hadn’t mentioned yet.

“Thinking,” Potter said.

Severus snorted in disgust and moved around him. He felt an ache in his hip, and sighed. He was not _old_ , but he might have too many ancient wounds to treat Potter as he had last night.

“What do you think I’m doing?”

Severus frowned and glanced over his shoulder. “I already asked that. You said you were thinking.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant in general.” Potter looked at him, and his eyes were truly unearthly now, filled with shadows that Severus thought had been in the bed with them last night. “Trying to break the curse.”

“You answered that for yourself, then.” Severus didn’t have to work hard to let the snappishness into his voice, or force away the uneasiness. “You are doing many things that are repetitive and imbecilic, I suspect, but then, you were never all that good at magic that didn’t have much to do with Defense, were you, Potter?”

To his astonishment, Potter began to laugh. He buried his head in his knees and quaked with laughter, shook with it. He swayed back and forth, and the eerie sound of a cackling such as Severus had only heard from Fenrir Greyback rose and pushed back the shadows stretching out from the fire, replacing them with Potter’s own.

Severus didn’t realize he was shouting until he heard the hoarse echo of his own voice, and then he didn’t mean to say the words until he heard them. “You are ransacking the graves of your loved ones to raise them as Inferi!”

Potter stopped laughing in the same unnatural manner he’d started, as if someone had cut his throat with a dark blade. He stared at Severus with parted lips, and Severus stared back, this time hiding dismay.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

Potter’s voice was low, inflectionless. Severus looked him in the eye and nodded once, glad both that he had spoken of this instead of his visits to Albus or the Unspeakables and that there was no sign the Deathly Hallows granted their Master the abilities of a Legilimens. “Yes, of course that’s what I think you’re doing.”

“Why?”

Severus faltered then. “You do not wish to see them again?” he asked, after a futile struggle to expunge emotion from his voice.

Potter shrugged, turning to face him and drawing attention to the bite on his collarbone and his wrists that still had rings of red around them. “Why would I want to bring them back when they would be soulless? I could just turn the Resurrection Stone around three times and see them if that’s what I wanted.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Trying to break the curse.”

“You would not need the teeth of the dead and the dust from their graves if your intentions were that innocent,” Severus snapped.

Potter tilted his head very slowly, looking like a great, alien bird. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”

Severus was in this now, and if he was not as secretive as he had desired to be, there was some pleasure to be found in confronting Potter. He folded his arms. “Of course it is. Draco told me about the grave robberies. I _know_ that you took the deaths of your friends hard.”

“You could say that.”

Potter’s face looked like it was carved out of iron, but Severus pressed on anyway. He was not one to be frightened by a skinny eleven-year-old who had gained a decade and a few stone of muscle. “But bringing them back will only give you Inferi without their spirit.”

“And I already told you that I don’t want that, and that I could speak to them with the Resurrection Stone if I only wished to see them again.”

“I don’t believe you.”

An odd smile flickered across Potter’s face. “Fortunately, your belief isn’t required.”

The sheer arrogance in his tone took Severus’s breath away. “And if I said that I was going to stop helping you? That I was going to kick you out of this house and refuse you the use of my brewing facilities?”

Potter looked up at him, eyes shiny and black and flat. His voice was quiet. “No, I don’t want that.”

“Then what are you _doing_? Give me an answer that I will believe.”

Potter sat still for a long moment, still enough that Severus found himself watching to see if the man’s chest yet rose and fell. Then Potter nodded. “Very well. I can respect your need for that. I am taking the teeth and grave dirt and other components because they will be needed in the ritual of breaking the curse.”

“Tell me about this ritual.”

Potter shrugged a little. “It needs representatives of all the things I’ve lost because I’m the Master of Death, all that I’m struggling to leave behind. That means that my lost family and friends need to be part of the circle.”

Severus’s breath caught in his throat in an ugly way. He struggled for a long moment, and then managed to say, “Tell me that you have not robbed your parents’ graves.”

“You mean Lily’s, right?”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t care about my father’s grave,” Potter said, his eyes intense and eerie, shining like pools reflecting the moon. “You mean that you don’t want to hear that I’ve desecrated my mother’s grave.”

“I would be equally as upset about Albus’s!”

“But you didn’t mention him.” Potter bowed his head and flowed to his feet, stalking towards Severus. For a moment, his shadow spread out and swayed, but this time in the shape of giant dark hands, not wings. “You’re only upset because you’re thinking of my mother’s grave.”

And perhaps Severus was, and he hadn’t allowed himself to realize that before. But what did it matter? He met Potter’s eyes, brutal gaze to brutal gaze, and said, “It doesn’t matter. I will not allow you to raise Inferi.”

Potter paused, and laughed. The sound was a death rattle. He gestured, and the dark shadows vanished from his shoulders. Severus blinked in what felt like a flood of light.

“I was right,” Potter said. “I told you the truth, and you didn’t believe me.” He shook his head. “I’m not calling them back.”

“There _is_ no ritual that uses the artifacts of the dead like this otherwise!” Severus snapped, although his head was beginning to ache with the realization that his Legilimency sense of when people were lying had so far not reacted to Potter’s statements. “I want you to let me read that book you’re always studying.”

Potter blinked, several times. Then he said, “You could have said. And I wonder if I should be worried about _you_. You’re leaping from thought to thought and acting erratic and refusing to listen to me.”

Severus snarled, and stalked over to him. Potter remained still and watched him come. Severus seized his throat and squeezed it, trying not to think that only a few hours before, he had been coaxing moans out of it. “I want to see that book,” he hissed, his face close to Potter’s and his cloudy eyes.

“Yes, very well,” Potter said softly. He reached out and turned, and the book was in his arms, melting out from the shadows.

“Where did you get it?” Severus found himself reluctant to touch the book now that he had his wish. There was a faint smell in the air that he associated with rotting flesh, and his skin crawled as he stared at the thing.

Potter gave a complicated shrug with one shoulder. “It was nearby. It’s always nearby now. That’s one of the powers of the Master of Death.”

Severus gave him a sharp glance as he took the book. “I know very well that I can’t kill you, Potter.”

“I wasn’t worried about _that_.”

That implied there was something he was worried about, but Severus wouldn’t drive himself mad figuring out for now. He tucked the tome under his arm and went back into his bedroom, expecting Potter to vanish some time in the near future.

*

The black book was—confusing.

The pages were full of information about what the book insisted on calling “the opposite of necromancy,” never by any shorter name. The circles Severus found were the ones that Potter had drawn on the parchment he had examined earlier that week, the circle with the roses in it and the one that Potter had put Ron Weasley’s name in. But there was no explanation of what they actually did. There was only illustration after illustration, and notes under them that said what the circles needed to be made of or how they should be drawn and what names should be placed in them to “achieve the desired result.”

There was blood magic. There was bone magic. There was what might be the ritual that the Dark Lord had used to return to life after Potter’s fourth year, although Severus had no certainty about that because of the odd terms the book kept using.

_How can he be sure of what he’s doing?_

Severus found himself skimming more and more, and he only left the bedroom to go into the kitchen once to get himself something to eat. Potter was still there, sitting naked in the middle of Severus’s hearthrug, his head drooped. Severus gave him a glance as he passed by, but Potter showed no sign of stirring or recognizing him.

_Perhaps he’s asleep._

Severus ignored his own odd feeling that the Master of Death no longer did anything as mortal as _sleep_ , and fixed a quick sandwich before he went back to the puzzling book.

There was no index, no table of contents, and even when he flipped back to the beginning, Severus found no sign that separated one spell from another. In fact, the more he looked, the more he realized the necromancers’ circles and the other illustrations on the page were _blended._ They overlapped, and so did the instructions, dancing beside each other in paragraph after paragraph of crabbed writing.

_How can Potter be sure of anything he’s doing? How does he know that he copied down the right instructions?_

He didn’t. Severus shut the book sure of one thing: whatever Potter was doing—whatever kind of necromancy it was, because of course it must be some kind—he was doing it purely out of hope. It wouldn’t actually bring his friends back.

 _Just like the other Potter you knew,_ Severus thought as he stepped out of his bedroom, the book tucked under his arm. _Always arrogant, always thinking that he had more talent than he did. I remember Rosier telling me that he overheard Potter and his friends bragging about becoming Animagi. Sirius Black managed it, but all of them?_

Severus felt a brief jolt of displeasure at remembering that Peter Pettigrew had managed it, too. But surely—

His thoughts broke off as he stared at the mess of black rose petals on the floor. Potter was gone now, but he had obviously been working on a potion again, probably something he hoped to use in some forbidden ritual, and he hadn’t cleaned up after himself. Severus’s drawing room floor was deep enough in rings of black rose petals that he could only imagine what the lab looked like.

With growing wrath, he flung the book on the kitchen counter and stalked into the lab.

The black rose petals were scattered here, too. And the cauldron was empty. It looked as though Potter had left his potion boiling so long that it had evaporated entirely.

Severus grabbed the edge of the cauldron, swearing under his breath, and winced as he cut his hand on an unexpected sharp edge. Well, it also made sense that Potter was so careless with his tools that he didn’t even notice when one of them hurt him.

Severus’s blood fell into the cauldron, and Severus found himself holding his breath. He had learned to his cost, while still young, that any combination of ingredients with blood was something to be avoided.

But nothing happened, and Severus let out a shaky curse. Potter’s incompetence at Potions had intensified, it seemed, if he had so thoroughly boiled this one away that not even reactive sludge remained.

Severus walked back into the drawing room, cursing again as his feet stirred the piles of black rose petals, and outside the house. He looked around carefully, in case Potter was waiting to ambush him or the like, but there was nothing in sight.

Except…

Severus moved towards a mark that Potter had made in the garden, his eyes narrowed. Severus’s garden was small, containing Potions ingredients only, and those packed as closely as they could be without interfering with one another. He still had to use trimming and pruning charms on them nearly every day.

In the middle of a patch of trampled nightshade was the symbol of the Deathly Hallows. Severus shook his head and turned to go back into the house.

 _Perhaps_ , he thought, _if Potter stays occupied with this kind of madness, I don’t have to worry about him raising Inferi after all._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to make it clear that I originally planned a different ending for this story, but the horrible little thing decided it wanted it this way.

Severus came out of his bedroom the next morning just in time to see Potter press his lips to the Elder Wand and lay it on the kitchen counter. Severus’s spine prickled all over, and he stared at Potter until he turned around.

 _At least he’s wearing clothes this time,_ Severus thought as he stalked over to the other side of the kitchen and began to make himself tea. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“The Wand is listening to me.”

Severus let his eyebrows creep up, although he didn’t stop making the tea. “Then you think you can persuade it to let you go and break the curse?”

“Breaking the curse would do less good now than it would have done once.” Potter seemed to slump over. “I did think that I would break it before it could grab hold of Teddy.”

Severus grimaced to himself and reached out to pat Potter’s shoulder, although everything in him wanted to flinch away from the contact. “I’m sure that you—that you managed to—that his shade will forgive you.”

“I hope it will.”

Potter’s voice sounded oddly cheerful. Severus continued to eye him throughout the morning as he worked on the potions that would be—could be, if it was Potter’s actual intention—used in a curse-breaking circle, and watched Potter.

Potter hummed under his breath. Potter drew circles on parchments. Potter spoke to the Cloak and the Stone in the same way, holding out his palm so that the Stone dropped into it and cradling the Cloak in his arms. And the whole time, he had the black book by his side.

The black book that had nothing but nonsense in it.

Severus frowned and shook his head, fastening his eyes on his cauldron again. It wouldn’t do to get distracted by the nonsense from his conviction that Potter planned to bring back Inferi and even try to sacrifice Severus himself to do it.

But the emotion that primarily swamped Severus now was pity.

*

“And you have learned nothing from young Harry?”

Severus snorted bitterly, even as he checked over his shoulder to make sure that Minerva hadn’t come through the Floo. It was exactly like Albus’s portrait to refer to Potter as “young Harry,” even when Severus had told the thing of his convictions.

“I know that he is grieving,” Severus said. “He said that he didn’t intend to bring back his friends and family as Inferi and it didn’t register as a lie to me, but that only means that he has learned to speak in such a way as to fool my Legilimency.”

Albus’s portrait hummed and cast a mournful glance at Minerva’s desk, which had a bowl of lemon drops on it. Severus found himself hoping it was tribute, and not a way to torture the portrait, although, honestly, that would be most unlike Minerva. “Have you considered that he is telling you the truth?”

“But then why gather the dust and bones from his friends’ tombs? From _yours_?”Severus added, because he thought the man was too little disturbed by that.

“Perhaps he does need it for the curse-breaking, just as he told you. Wasn’t that his motivation? Breaking the curse, not bringing them back?”

“I can’t think of any curse that could be broken that way.”

“Ah, but you haven’t heard of everything that could be done, Severus, for all your expertise.” Albus’s eyes had an annoying tendency to shine even when they didn’t twinkle. “And you said that the necromantic circles he was drawing, the ones that you saw several days ago, were odd in some fashion. Perhaps they aren’t necromantic circles at all?”

“Then what are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Old man,” Severus hissed, leaning close to the portrait and doing his best to ignore Albus’s smile, “if you know _something_ , then you should tell me. Do you have any idea of the damage Potter could do by bringing those Inferi back? Surely not even _you_ would smile if one of them got loose in Hogwarts.”

At least that did make the portrait lose his smile, but he sighed and shook his head. “I can’t believe it of young Harry, no matter how far gone in grief he is. That he would release one of them inside Hogwarts, I mean. I simply can’t believe it.”

“You may not have a _choice_ if—”

“Albus? Is someone here?”

Severus had become too involved in the quarrel with Albus, and missed the moment when Minerva came up the moving stairs. At least he still had his Disillusionment Charm on, and he had been whispering harshly at Albus, not shouting. He moved around her while Albus chattered at her and asked about the lemon drops again, and only relaxed when he was on the moving staircase himself, heading down.

Albus couldn’t help. Or, more to the point, wouldn’t help, given that he still had the best opinion possible of a Potter who had done such mad things as this one had done. Which left—what? What could Severus do that he hadn’t done?

And then it came to him, and he sighed. Such direct confrontations were foreign to his nature, but he had already directly spoken to Potter about his supposed plan to bring his friends back as Inferi. What was this but one more continuation of that?

*

“Professor Snape?”

Severus stalked around Potter, whom he had bound to the chair in the drawing room where he was most prone to sit while pondering over that black book. “I want answers from you. You said that you don’t plan to bring your friends back as Inferi. What do you plan to do instead?”

Potter stared at him with huge dark eyes that were more black than green and shook his head a little. “Nothing that requires _this_ level of bondage,” he said, and eyed the ropes that were tying him.

Severus hissed. That wasn’t an answer. He moved closer, and put his hand around Potter’s throat, squeezing a little. Potter only looked at him calmly, and Severus supposed that he had the right to, given that such a thing couldn’t kill him.

“Tell me.”

“Break the curse.”

Severus cursed himself, and flung his hand away from Potter’s throat to stalk around the chair again. “You have answered that and answered that and _answered that_! I want you to tell me what specific things you are undertaking to break the curse.”

Potter considered him, and then nodded. “I suppose that you have the right to know.”

“ _Yes, I do_.”

“Given that I’ve wasted so much of your time.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean, Potter?”

Potter smiled at him, and Severus saw the shadows bleeding away from his shoulders, stretching towards the walls, forming those great wing-like shapes that Severus had thought were the wings of an angel of death. Now, he saw them clearly, if only in silhouette, and he realized they were leathery-looking, like the wings of a bat.

Or a dragon.

“Having you brew the potions and look things up for me that weren’t really relevant,” Potter said softly. “But thank you for finding the inscriptions on the Hallows. I wouldn’t have thought to look for them there, and they did tell me how to move forwards.”

The wings fluttered, and all his bonds on Potter simply—vanished. Potter stood up, and he was taller, the way he had looked more than once before, and smiling with that rictus-like expression.

Severus reached for his wand.

Potter breathed out, once, and Severus’s wand broke in his hand. Severus was left staring at the splinters of ebony standing out around the wound in his hand for a moment.

Too long.

Potter’s shadows grabbed him, and the Cloak rose up around their heads like an awning, and the Wand settled into Potter’s hand, and the Stone hovered above his left hand, orbiting it when he moved.

Potter said something in a language that wasn’t Parseltongue or Latin or English, a language that sounded like someone choking to death on a lungful of soup, and the floor flared and shifted with light. Severus heard soft, sharp rustles, and looked down.

The drifts of black rose petals that he had found on the floor the other day—and it abruptly occurred to him that he hadn’t even cleaned them up, and _why not_?—were moving, rotating in circles. From the cauldron in the lab that Severus had shed his blood into, and hadn’t cleaned up, either, there came a deep bubbling. And there was a soft, deep calling underneath all that that Severus knew, without knowing how he knew, came from the symbol of the Deathly Hallows Potter had trampled in the nightshade.

“The circle is here,” Potter said gently. “It always was. It was simply too big for you to see it.”

And then the shadows scooped Severus up, and hauled him outside.

*

The circle went all the way around the cottage, from what Severus could tell, formed from black rose petals that he hadn’t even noticed, and centered on the smaller rings inside the house. And the cauldron with the blood in it stood in one section of the circle, and the nightshade symbol was in the center, and Severus was staked out there, bound with silver ropes of the same kind he had conjured the night he and Potter had sex. He was stretched, spread-eagled, bonds curled around his hands that held them open, his legs spread.

Severus was alive with rage and hatred and fear that made him throw himself against his bonds.

This did not a bit of good. The ropes against his wrists, in particular, were cold with something that Severus thought was the power of Death, and made him numb almost instantly.

“You don’t need to worry about me hurting you,” Potter said, pausing for a moment in walking around the circle to look at Severus with those bright, blank eyes. “Killing you is the last thing I want.”

Severus stared at him, and had to open his teeth, which were clenched shut on his tongue, before he could say anything. “You are going to _sacrifice_ me.”

“Well, yes,” Potter conceded, as if it was a minor consideration.

Severus gathered up all the magic that had ever brimmed in his hands, the kind that he had used most often on brewing potions and creating new spells, and tried to fling it at Potter. It fizzled out and danced and dashed into the bonds around his wrists. Severus closed his eyes and tried to master his immense frustration.

“ _Mors_ ,” Potter breathed, scattering more of the black rose petals over Severus’s chest.

Severus’s eyes snapped open again. Maybe he could at least disrupt Potter’s ritual, even though he no longer thought he could save himself. He blew, as hard as he could.

The black rose petals trembled, but didn’t scatter. Potter shook his head and laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “In a few minutes, you’ll have all the breath that you could want.”

A few _minutes_? All the rituals Severus knew of took longer than that—

And then he remembered how long Potter’s ritual had been in progress, with the scattering of ingredients around the house and the building of circles that he hadn’t even been aware of, and the intense despair overwhelmed him again.

Potter clucked his tongue. “Look, despair isn’t appropriate right now,” he said, strewing more rose petals around Severus’s head and arms and then his body, outlining him. Severus had no idea what they were for, but then, he didn’t have to know. He supposed he would die with his curiosity unsatisfied. “Maybe after the ritual is finished.”

Severus laughed hollowly. “Do the dead feel despair?”

“Oh, yes,” Potter said very softly. “They can.”

Severus swallowed, wondering if he would be one of the spirits that Potter summoned with the Resurrection Stone. Would he have to watch as the Inferi that Potter had raised rampaged across the country and devoured Muggles and wizards alike? Would he have to watch as Hogwarts burned?

It seemed odd to him, for a moment, that he would care so much about that, but then he shook his head. He had fought long enough to keep the castle standing. It was natural that he would have an interest in what happened to it.

“Will you summon me back to watch the destruction?” Severus asked, craning his neck enough so that he could see Potter as he stepped away from the rose petals. “Or will you promise that you’ll keep the Inferi away from Hogwarts?”

Potter clucked his tongue again. The sound was deeper than it should have been, bouncing echoes from walls that weren’t there. “I told you before, Snape. I’m not summoning Inferi.”

“There’s nothing else you can be doing,” Severus snapped. _Stubborn to the last_ , he thought, and he wasn’t sure if he was talking about Potter or himself. “If you won’t make the promise, will you at least tell me how you managed to sound like you were telling the truth when you claimed that you weren’t resurrecting the dead? I can usually tell when someone is lying, but it sounded like you were telling the truth.”

“That’s because I was.”

Severus shut his eyes. Fine. Potter was too deep in madness to make any promises, to tell the truth, to do anything but sacrifice Severus.

Potter began to chant, softly. The words were once more in that language he had used before that didn’t sound like Parseltongue or Latin or English. Now and then, however, Severus caught the edge of a syllable he understood. He supposed the black book couldn’t have been _entirely_ in another language, or Potter, dunderhead that he was, wouldn’t have been able to master the incantations.

The thought of the book cheered Severus up a little. He decided that there was the chance the ritual wouldn’t work, even if he died, and he might get to watch from the afterlife as Potter raged. It was the only vengeance he could hope for after Potter tore his heart out of his chest, or whatever would really happen.

Maybe Potter would give him _this_ information.

“Tell me how you plan to sacrifice me,” Severus murmured, keeping his eyes shut.

For a long moment, the chant mounted, and he thought Potter would ignore him. But then Potter whispered, “I plan to make you suffer.”

Severus flinched despite himself. He had hoped that the ritual’s short timespan meant that wouldn’t be so. He started to comment again, but something small and hard dropped onto him, startling him so much that he opened his eyes again.

The Resurrection Stone was sitting on his chest.

“I plan to accept what you said about my not being a master.”

The Elder Wand snapped into being above Severus’s eyes, and then dropped and covered his mouth. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t open his mouth under it.

Or stop his mind’s racing. What was Potter _doing_ —

Potter stepped across the border of the circle then, and he was smiling. The black shadows flared above his shoulders, this time once again manifesting as giant hands instead of wings. They reached out and pinned Severus’s hands down more effectively than the bonds had done.

“I plan,” Potter whispered, “to die.”

The Invisibility Cloak appeared, turning and shimmering, beside him, as if draped over an invisible model. Then it flapped over and settled on Severus’s chest, over the Stone that rested—he realized it now—exactly over his heart.

Potter tossed back his head and howled, “ _It is done_!”

The shadowy hands broke away from him, and hovered for a long second. Then they descended, and stretched out along Severus’s arms as if sprouting from his shoulders.

He screamed, despite the fact that the sound rattled in his throat, trapped by the Elder Wand. There was _cold_ rushing over him, and horror, and pain, and the sense of something hovering just beyond sight, and the sudden glimpse of a long life, an immortal life, stretching away in front of him—

Potter had been telling the truth. He had never intended to raise Inferi.

He had _transferred the curse._

Severus managed to open his eyes in time to see Potter smile down at him. “Congratulations,” he said, “Master of Death.”

And he took an iron dagger from his pocket, and cut his own throat.

The look in his eyes as he died was joyous.

*

The bonds had melted the moment Potter had died, but Severus had still lain on the earth for a long time before he could stand.

He limped to his feet and stared down at the body. Potter’s chest was motionless under the flow of blood, dark in the moonlight. His hand was still flung out as though reaching towards someone, but the other coiled underneath the dagger.

Severus stared down at him, and understood so much that he hadn’t before.

The words about death that Potter had spoken as Severus had bedded him, and his statement that _some_ of his inaudibly muttered words had been Severus’s name. That made sense if he had been invoking part of the ritual even then, part of making sure the curse transferred “cleanly” to Severus.

The drifts of black rose petals had been part of the circle, of course, and the blood in the cauldron, and the symbol in the garden. Severus had been fully entangled in the ritual by then. He could recognize that, now. He had thought they were strange, but made no move to clean them up. He had only thought that Potter had been lost to madness.

And for that matter, his failure to understand the book and the fact that he hadn’t stopped helping Potter even when he thought Potter was going to sacrifice him were probably part of it, too. The ritual had calmed his mind, made him a more willing victim, drawn him further down and down the path.

 _Have any of my thoughts since the day Potter first came to visit me been my own_?

He hadn’t been able to persuade the Elder Wand because Potter had already persuaded it.

Something draped over his shoulders. Severus glanced to the side, and of course it was the Cloak. In his right hand rested the Wand, and Severus knew without asking that if he tried to buy and use another wand, or repair his ebony one, it would no longer function for him. The Stone was turning, spinning in place in the air, over his left shoulder.

Severus drew a deep, painful breath, and remembered the words Potter had spoken when he had explained why he’d come seeking Severus’s help.

“The curse takes people I _love_. No chance of that here, Professor Snape.”

Potter had hated him. Or had had an unchanged opinion of him. Or had been so far gone into madness and desire to die, by that point, that he hadn’t really cared who he used as victim, but it had to be someone who would both agree to research further into the curse and wouldn’t have a large network of people who cared for him and would notice the ritual’s odd effects.

And no, Potter had not been lying when he said that he wasn’t trying to resurrect his friends as Inferi.

The fact that Severus had no one who lived nearby meant there was no to hear the maniacal laughter arising from his throat, either.

*

In the crowd that attended Potter’s funeral, it was easy to be one more anonymous, black-cloaked figure at the back.

In the end, it had been easy to deposit Potter’s body on the steps of St. Mungo’s, where he had left the body of Andromeda Tonks, and include the dagger that he had slit his throat with. Death’s Invisibility Cloak had provided Severus abundant protection to pass unnoticed, and he had learned something when he was in the Death Eaters about arranging bodies to look as if they had died in some other way.

And, well, it wasn’t a surprise that Harry Potter had killed himself, was it, after the deaths of all his friends and most of his adopted family?

Severus stood and watched as Potter’s body was lowered into the ground at Godric’s Hollow to rest between those of his parents, watched as people wept about Potter and announced that they wished the “great hero” had turned to them when he became suicidal, watched as everyone stormed and cried and got it wrong.

None of the surviving Weasleys were in attendance, although Severus had heard that the strange disease consuming George Weasley from the inside had vanished as quickly as it had begun.

Severus, himself, was still caught in a frozen tangle of emotions, but one thing was standing out to him. Perhaps the curse was not so bad. He could use immortality as a chance to research all the potions and create all the spells he would never have had time to perfect with a mere mortal lifespan. And it was not as though he had had the abundance of loved ones that Potter did. What could the curse take from him? No one.

It happened as the final wand-flick of dirt descended on the top of Potter’s coffin.

A soft laugh sounded in the back of Severus’s mind. He tilted his head towards it, convinced it was the laughter of the Elder Wand which he had heard once before.

But it sounded higher-pitched and colder. The Cloak trembled on his back, and Severus realized where it was coming from.

 _Nothing we can take? Are you sure?_ asked a voice in the back of his head

Severus hadn’t heard it in years, but he knew it immediately. That was Lily’s voice.

A sharp, twisting pain up his arms made him gasp. Severus stared down at his hands, and saw an illusion spread over them, transparent and dancing like St. Elmo’s fire at sea.

He saw his hands twisted with arthritis, knobbed with pain, incapable of brewing.

The grating laughter of the Stone echoed in his ears, and then he heard Draco’s voice, distant but panicked, saying, “Severus? Something has—happened to Scorpius. We don’t know what, we don’t understand what disease this _is_. Can you help?”

Then there was what he knew for the Wand’s laughter, this time, and in his head, Albus’s portrait burned.  
 _  
Cursed be he who holds this with the loss of all he loves.  
_  
Severus closed his eyes.

*

Some love too little, some too long,  
Some sell, and others buy;  
Some do the deed with many tears,  
And some without a sigh:  
For each man kills the thing he loves,  
\--Yet each man does not die.

 **The End**.


End file.
